Captain Babo's Cabin: Stowe, Race and Misreading in "Benito Cereno"

Captain Babo’s Cabin: Stowe, Race and Misreading in “Benito Cereno” EZRA F. TAWIL Columbia University While giving some directions about setting a lower stu’n’-sail, suddenly Captain Delano heard a voice faithfully repeating his orders. Turning, he saw Babo, now for the time acting, under the pilot, his original part of captain of the slaves. This assistance proved valuable. Tattered sails and warped yards were soon brought into some trim. And no brace or halyard was pulled but to the blithe songs of the inspirited negroes. “Benito Cereno” A s is now widely understood in Melville criticism, “Benito Cereno” everywhere suggests that the primary cause of Delano’s fatal selfdeception is his own racism.1 From the moment he boards the C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc Portions of this article are drawn from my The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). I would like to thank Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint that material here. 1 In his brief discussion of “Benito Cereno” in Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (London and New York: Allison & Busby, 1985; orig. pub. 1953), C.L.R. James argues that “Melville . . . in the opinions of the capable, wellmeaning , Negro-loving Captain Delano, itemized every single belief cherished by an advanced civilization . . . about a backward people and then one by one showed that they were not merely false, but were the direct cause of his own blindness and stupidity” (133). See also Glenn Altschuler, “Whose Foot on Whose Throat: A Reexamination of Melville’s Benito Cereno,” CLAJ 18. 3 (1975); Sandra A. Zagarell, “Reenvisioning America: Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” ESQ 30 (1984): 245-59; Eric J. Sundquist, “Benito Cereno and New World Slavery,” in Re-Constructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 93-122; H. Bruce Franklin, “Past Present and Future Seemed One,” in Critical Essays on “Benito Cereno,” ed. Robert E. Burkholder (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992), 230-46; H. Bruce Franklin, “Slavery and Empire: Melville’s Benito Cereno,” in Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, ed. John Bryant and Robert Milder (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1997), 147-61; Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 19-27, 128-32; Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 109-30; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 165-230. For a metacritical account of how Melville criticism shifted from earlier twentieth-century readings of Babo as a figure of depravity and evil (and as a symptom of Melville’s unconscious racism) to later readings of the story as a critique of racism, see Allan Moore Emery, “The Topicality of Depravity in ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 55. 3 (1983), 316-61. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 37 C A P T A I N B A B O ’ S C A B I N San Dominick, the “noisy indocility of the blacks in general,” along with various other “peculiarities of captain and crew” repeatedly give Delano the opportunity to uncover the true state of affairs.2 Yet he cannot do so, because he cannot imagine the “blacks” to be in a position of power or control. In particular, his misapprehensions rest on his assumption of the mental inferiority of the San Dominick’s “negroes,” whom he considers “too stupid” to have formulated such a “design” on the “whites,” who “by nature were the shrewder race” (NN PT 75). Time and again, Melville shows us how Delano soothes his fears and suspicions with the comforting balm of his racism, as when he feels an “apprehensive twitch” of fear upon being surrounded...